Dresner, Blanch

ORAL HISTORY OF BLANCHE DRESNER
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
December 20, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is December 20, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the studio of BBB Communications, LLC. 170 Randolph Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take an oral history from Mrs. Blanche Dresner about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her address is 111 Stanton Lane, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Please state your full name, place of birth and date please.
MRS. DRESNER: My name is Blanche Dresner. My place of birth is Brooklyn, New York, and my birthday is 12/22/33.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name and his place of birth and date?
MRS. DRESNER: My father’s name was Ben Hershman and he was born in Russia. And you want his date of birth?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes ma’am.
MRS. DRESNER: November the 11th, 1908.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you state your maiden name when I asked you?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I did not.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your maiden name?
MRS. DRESNER: Hershman.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s maiden name and place of birth and date?
MRS. DRESNER: My mother’s maiden name was Eva Balaban. Her place of birth was also in Russia and her date of birth was questionable. We had two dates for her. We thought her birthday was January the 22nd, of ’08, but it turns out my father told me he had a secret after my mother passed away to tell me. And I said, “What was it?” He said, “You know your mother was really ten years older than I?” I said, “Oh good, women are supposed to be older than men.” So I don’t know if her birthday was 1908 or 1898. Your guess is as good as mine.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. DRESNER: I have one sister.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what’s her name?
MRS. DRESNER: Her name is Lilly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And is she living today?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where does she live?
MRS. DRESNER: She lives in San Diego, California.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how your father got from Russia to the U.S.?
MRS. DRESNER: On a boat. I have been able to learn from the internet the manifest of the ship. It gave the names of his two sisters and his dad and mom. They came here – I don’t know when they landed. I know they came through Ellis Island. He came when he was a young boy, eight, ten, twelve, something in the junior high area. He went to Pittsburgh and settled in Pittsburgh. They came of course to be free.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother and father were married at that time?
MRS. DRESNER: No, my mother was not married at that time. She came shortly thereafter. I searched the records at Ellis Island and I can’t find her so she must have come in through a different port. I just have not spent the time doing that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you know how they met?
MRS. DRESNER: I think the families knew each other in Europe. When they came here, they had to be sponsored by someone. Family always got together. Family was a very important thing to the people. My parents met again here in the States after they both arrived in the U.S.A... Everyone was related in some way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did they end up in New York?
MRS. DRESNER: When my father and mother did marry they ended up in New York because that’s where he got a job. I can remember he had a grocery store – a sort of everything grocery store there. I remember the tubs of butter. After a while, the big supermarkets, I think it was A&P at the time, came into the area. That closed them up. They couldn’t handle the competition.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was your sister born in New York as well?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, she was born also in Brooklyn.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little bit about your life in Brooklyn growing up.
MRS. DRESNER: It’s going to be hard to remember, but I can remember myself as a little girl. I was about five – I mean he still had the grocery store through the first five years of my life. It was a good life. I remember he had a car and we’d go places and do things. I can remember eating in the rear of the store. My mother would fix me lunch at the grocery store in the back and I didn’t always like what she served and so if a customer came in and she had to leave I would run away from the store until she could find me and then we’d eat again. It was a good life. Then we moved to a place called Mount Vernon, which is also Manhattan, and I went to elementary school there. I can remember I was in kindergarten and first grade. Then we moved to Queens. My father had no real education. He probably went through the 8th grade in school, but he could build or construct anything. Pencil and paper tasks were not his mainstay. He could configure things in his head, measure and do stuff that used to amaze me considering that he had no formal education. He worked for the Navy shipyards during the war and my sister was born in ’39. Dad was just a day worker. I can remember him getting up early in the morning and going to the Brooklyn Navy shipyards. They would call you. They would have day workers come in and they would call you for jobs. That’s what he did for a long time. My mother was a stay at home mom. My dad’s dad, my grandfather, had a grocery store in the area and we lived under the elevated trains. I can remember the trains.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the trains.
MRS. DRESNER: Well after a while you don’t really hear the noise. You get these trains just running by. It was the subway, but it was over ground at the time. They still have some over ground. It was just a neighborhood that I could go and do what I wanted. I was a pretty independent kid and my parents were busy working.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was the neighborhood crowded? Were there a lot of people that lived in that particular area?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, yes, it was. They were not the tenements that were built later on in certain areas of Manhattan, but they were apartment buildings … a lot of them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little more about your schooling. What type of classes did you take when you went to school?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, I was in regular elementary school and when I lived in Mount Vernon and then when I was in second grade we moved to Queens. That’s where I grew up, in Queens. When I came to Queens I went to a school that ran from kindergarten through the 8th grade. It was a big school and each floor was different levels. That was where I got my education during the war. I was there through the Second World War. That was more country. Queens was more of a country place, like Oak Ridge but a little more crowded. They had more of one family, two family homes, attached homes … it was more country. We’d take our bikes and make tracks on the streets. We’d go out. We played, played, played.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What types of games did or playing did you do?
MRS. DRESNER: We played touch football, we played Kick the Can, we played softball, we played you name it – we played Tag, Hide ‘n Seek. My girlfriend had a bricked in backyard and in the wintertime we’d fill it with water and when it froze we could go ice skating on it. At that time we lived not too far from The World’s Fair. They had closed down as The World’s Fair, but they had a huge building in there that later became the first UN building. Half of it was ice skating and the other half of it was roller skating. If you went from nine to twelve in the morning you’d go free. It was a city place for skating. If you wanted to go in the afternoon you’d have to spend twenty two cents to get in and go ice skating and roller skating.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you get around the city, other than your bicycle?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, we had trolleys, which later turned into buses, and subway. We had a wonderful subway system.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the cost to ride the trolleys?
MRS. DRESNER: Probably about a nickel I think, maybe five cents. Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After eighth grade what was the next school that you attended?
MRS. DRESNER: I went to high school. I went to a place called Forest Hills High School, which was in Forest Hills, Queens. Actually, the high school I should have gone to was called Newtown, not in Connecticut. This was in New York in Queens. I should have gone there. That was in my district, because you had to go according to what your district was. My mother didn’t think that was a good school. So she fibbed and said I lived with a cousin. I’m confessing after all these years. I went to Forest Hills High School and graduated from Forest Hills High School. I rode a trolley or a bus – two buses to get there every morning and two buses to get back. As far as the elementary school goes, we walked. We didn’t have school buses.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe growing up in those days?
MRS. DRESNER: Absolutely, wherever I went. Even when I got into college when I got into City College of New York, CCNY, which is part of the city system. I think I paid $4.50 or $5 a semester for registration and then I guess some small amount for books. I can’t remember buying books, but I know I had books.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was some of your favorite classes when you were in high school?
MRS. DRESNER: Originally, I was a psychology major. At first, City College was a school just for men. Women were later allowed to go into engineering or education. However, in 1952 the entire school integrated. I always knew I wanted to work with kids from the time I was very, very little. So I did, I went to City College in the education track and started taking classes. By the time I went into my junior year, the law changed and females were accepted into every department. They opened it up to females and I decided well what am I going to do now? I am almost two years down the road and I really didn’t want to stay in elementary education. I found special education, but special education had been just a graduate department. You could only go there as a graduate student, but I was very lucky and they opened that up at the right time so I could go into the special education department. So now I had to think of a way that I could do all my required education courses, because they required that you get the bachelors in Regular Ed., as well as Special Ed. They allowed me in one year to take all of those wonderful education classes so that I could start my special education curriculum once I got through those. It was probably the most boring year of my life to take all those classes and it was fine – we worked through it. It was terrible but…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now you lived at home while you were going to this city college?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, lived at home and traveled on the train to get there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: During your time in high school and college, what about dating in a city like that?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, we went in groups. In those days, when you’re 15 … we didn’t need boyfriends and girlfriends. We all hung out together. We did things together and so we belonged to groups of kids. I don’t remember what they were, but they were just groups of kids of different organizations like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. I can remember in the summer they had, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Police Athletic League? It was a group run through the police department and they had camps in the summer. You had to qualify by being poor enough to get to go there, which I did. For many summers, I would sign up and go to those camps and it was $5 for the two weeks. They were wonderful camps. They were up in the mountains in the Catskills somewhere and I went to camp for two weeks for $5. If you were a really good camper you got to stay two weeks for free. I did that several times too, stay two weeks for free. I love the outdoors. I like swimming. I like all the sports and I wasn’t afraid of anything. The only thing I didn’t like unfortunately was fishing because I was always the one that got stuck putting the worm on the hook. That’s not fishing for me. I couldn’t do that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I assume your parents had an accent. Is that correct?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, they did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Growing up with parents like that how do you develop your own accent or the accent for the area that you live in? Is there an influence from your parent’s accent.
MRS. DRESNER: No, not really because remember almost everyone I knew had parents that had accents. All the kids, I went to school with all colors of children, black, oriental. You just name it they came from all over the world into New York. We all had a New York accent. In fact, people still say I have it now. I suppose I do, but let me tell you it is nothing like you will hear if you go to New York and hear some people talk.
MR. HUNNICUTT: No, you don’t have a true New York accent.
MRS. DRESNER: No, but I’ve been here for a long time so…
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after you got out of college what did you do then?
MRS. DRESNER: I got out of college. I had a bachelor’s degree in education, both regular and special. I did my student teaching in special education and I graduated in January. You could graduate in January or in June. The principal asked me if I could take over a second grade class for the next six months. The teacher was going on maternity leave. I said, “Sure”. It was great because that particular school was very close to Pennsylvania Railroad Station and my husband and I had at that point moved to Princeton where he was a graduate student. He had been traveling back and forth while I was finishing school. So I decided I was going to be the one that traveled back and forth. I told the principal, “There’s a train that comes in to New York, but I will be a little late.” He said, “Don’t worry you can sign in.” We had to punch a time clock back then. Although he said, “You can sign in so you can come and take over for six months.” I did and it was a wonderful experience, especially when you have 35 students in your class, all second graders. Very few of whom speak English because it was really in the heart of where most of the Puerto Rican children immigrated to with their families so they were all Spanish speaking. I remember those days fondly because the only Spanish I knew was what I had learned in school. The kids used to laugh at me because of my Spanish accent. I know my husband came up to see me one day, we were going to go somewhere and he said, “God, I heard somebody like a top sergeant shouting down at the end of the hall.” It’s me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what’s your husband’s name?
MRS. DRESNER: Lawrence, Larry Dresner.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And how did you meet him?
MRS. DRESNER: I met him at school, at City College. I had a girlfriend that had graduated six months before I did and so when she was there she already was entrenched in a group of friends in the cafeteria. She said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to some of my friends.” Well, he was one of the friends.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now when you attended elementary school and high school and even college, what do you remember how you dressed when you went to school? What did girls wear to school in those days?
MRS. DRESNER: That’s a good question. I guess I wore skirts a lot. We couldn’t afford too much. Remember when I was in high school we had these sweaters that had these big pictures all over them, that were very popular at that time. But it was skirts. If I had a pair of jeans I don’t think I would have worn them to school at that time, I really don’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now when you first heard the word about Pearl Harbor where were you?
MRS. DRESNER: I was eight years old barely. I don’t know where I was. I remember where I was the day I heard about when President Roosevelt died.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were your first thoughts on that?
MRS. DRESNER: Well just sadness. I mean to me the only president there ever could be in the whole world of course was Roosevelt. He was there when I was born and as far as I knew he was going to be there until I died. It was the same thing with Joe Lewis. You remember Joe Lewis?
MR. HUNNICUTT: The boxer?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, the boxer. He was always champ, when I was born and there was not supposed to be another boxer. He was the one. But President Roosevelt was quite a shock. I didn’t know that much about him at the time other than hearing my parents and other people talk about him, but it was like losing a member of your family.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you and your husband, when did you come to Oak Ridge? And why did you come to Oak Ridge?
MRS. DRESNER: Okay, we came to Oak Ridge for just a summer while still students in 1953. That was because my husband had met someone at Princeton, where he was doing his graduate work, who in conversation had said to him, “If you’re looking for a summer job, why don’t you come to Oak Ridge?” And we did. We had a wonderful time. We sublet one of the Brick Apartments and we made many friends there and we went home at the end of the summer. We bought a car from a man by the name of Harry Thomas. Till this day I still wonder if he was any relation to the Police Chief.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s the same one.
MRS. DRESNER: Same one? That’s what I thought. Well, thank you. You’ve confirmed that for me. We bought a Ford station wagon with wooden doors. Remember the old station wagons?
MR. HUNNICUTT: We called them Woodies.
MRS. DRESNER: Woodies, is that what you called them? Well, for $200 can you imagine? We had that in Oak Ridge and I remember he lived up on Michigan Avenue or somewhere in that area. We got the car and that was the car that took us back home at the end of the summer. It was some car. In fact, a couple of my friends were visiting me. If I don’t have this mixed up with another time, I had to go back earlier for some reason and so my husband and my two friends packed that car with all of our stuff and came up to Queens, which was where I was living. You couldn’t get another metal hanger in there. That was how it was packed. It was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Cars were big in those days. So you had a lot in there?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, yes we did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now up to this point, the summer of 1953, were you still teaching the second grade?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I was in college. I didn’t graduate from college until January of ’54. See that’s why I had to be back. I had to be back in time to finish school and start work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what did you think about Oak Ridge when you first came?
MRS. DRESNER: Well. That’s an interesting story.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Be truthful.
MRS. DRESNER: Truthful, I will. I said to my husband when we came in here, “You’ve got two years in here and then I’m going and you can come with me or not.” I’m not usually that decisive always with something like that, but I said, “There’s no way.” I remember there was a little wooden bridge that we had to go on if we went from Solway over to Kingston Pike, before Pellissippi. We went through back roads. In fact, I went that way to UT for many years, but by that time they had put in a nice little bridge. I used to hold my breath every time I went over that little bridge. You talk about country – for me – we lived in large places. We lived in apartments and stuff, but they had concrete on the streets. There were trolleys and buses and everything was crowded. I came here and it was really country. If you went to the store to buy stuff you had to improvise lots of times, because you couldn’t get the variety of foods you had in New York.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your thought about the people here?
MRS. DRESNER: I judge people for who they are and not where they live or where they come from. When I came here – I liked everyone. I really did, until you showed me that I shouldn’t like you. When we came here I went around looking for a job because I wanted to get some work. Oak Ridge had at that time only one class for mentally retarded children and my specialty was Special Ed. They already had a teacher and they weren’t going to say to her, “You go because we want her”. I went to the county and John Rice Irwin may have been the man who was superintendent at the time. I saw him. You’ve lived here all your life, haven’t you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. DRESNER: Do you remember a place on the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike called Daniel Arthur Rehabilitation Center?
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s on Emory Valley Road.
MRS. DRESNER: Now it is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well it was at one time, but in the beginning you’re right. That’s where it was.
MRS. DRESNER: It was on the Turnpike. Right across from where the hospital is and there’s a gas station there now I think. Anyway, that’s where I worked. It was really a two room school house and I got one of the classes. There were about 17 very handicap children. From very handicap to fairly good, functioning children. Rose Skirtnansky, she’s gone now, but she was here for many years. She got the older kids. I always had the younger ones. The bus driver, Peepsie Sieber, was my teaching assistant and I taught there for a year. I was introduced to many of the county children. It was a county school, in Oak Ridge. I was invited to their homes. One time my husband and I and some other friends decided we were going to go driving around to see Petros and some of the other areas. We wanted to see the prison. The other people I think were from – they weren’t from Oak Ridge either. They were imports. We went up and there was an accident. We had an accident. Some young boy and his friends came tearing down the mountain. We were going up. They were coming down the mountain and side swiped us. We were lucky because when I looked out the side there was just a precipice there. We thought, “Oh my gosh,” so we got out of the car. When we drove up we did not see a soul, not a soul. As we went up the mountain, after we got hit by this kid, people came from all over. They just came down, walked down to where we were. They were concerned about our welfare. One of the women with us was about in her ninth month. So they were really concerned and talked to us. They were the nicest, most welcoming strangers. After that I never had any worries. I’d go anywhere, anywhere.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This was in the Petros area?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, going up to where the prison is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the address where you first lived?
MRS. DRESNER: 192 North Purdue. That was when we lived here for the summer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about when you came back as a permanent resident?
MRS. DRESNER: As a permanent resident, we also lived in the Brick Apartments for a short time. We graduated from a one bedroom, to a two bedroom, to a three bedroom. As our family grew, the apartments got larger. It was always in the row of Brick Apartments.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you notice different about the Oak Ridge apartments versus apartments in Brooklyn?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, the only apartment in Brooklyn or Queens, or wherever we live. I didn’t really have to do a whole lot there as my mother used to do everything, but the one thing I noticed about the apartments in Oak Ridge at that time was they sure had a lot of cockroaches. In fact, there was a lot of young couples, our friends, and what we would do is we’d come home from a movie and before we went into anyone’s apartment we would take turns. We’d roll up newspapers and we’d walk into the apartments and swat away. Turn the light on, okay one, two, three, go. Turn the lights on and swat the fool out of the cockroaches. That’s what I remembered about them, but they were nice. They were adequate. They were roomy. We even adopted a dog that lived two doors down. He loved us and we loved him and he’d come and spend his days with us. It was nice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever meet Daniel Arthur?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I did not. The gentleman that was directing the place at the time … his name was John. I’ve forgotten his last name, but he himself had cerebral palsy. He managed the school and after he left – at the time when he was still there and we were there we had a school psychologist. He was a traveling school psychologist. I imagine him going around on a horse. He didn’t though, he had a car. You probably have heard of him. His name is…I’ll think of it in a second. My Rolodex doesn’t spin quite as fast anymore. Brody. Steve Brody. Do you remember a Steve Brody?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes, I’ve heard the name.
MRS. DRESNER: So he eventually went from being a school psychologist to being director of Daniel Arthur. He ran it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When did Daniel Arthur move to Emory Valley Road. Do you remember?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I don’t. Sometime in the early ‘60s, late ‘50s.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I think you’re right. Did you work at that particular school then?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I never got into that building. What I did do for about two and a half years, is run a preschool for the parents of the handicapped children. This was after that one year at Daniel Arthur. I quit work in order to start my family. I became pregnant and Anderson County allowed me to go ahead and teach even though I was pregnant, because I said to them, “These kids are probably used to pregnant things walking around on the farm. I’m no different. I just walk around the farm.” And they did. They agreed. They let me stay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little about how you approach teaching children like that, of that caliber?
MRS. DRESNER: Just the way I would approach anyone else, any other kid. Show them that I love them, that I was not their friend, that I was their teacher. We had a great relationship. That’s where I learned that a poke - you know what a poke is?
MR. HUNNICUTT: A bag.
MRS. DRESNER: Yeah, but I didn’t know what a poke was. One kid came up to me one day and he said, “Mrs. Dresner, do you have a poke?” He told me it was a paper bag, so you know they educated me as well. They were kids, they were all kids. Those that didn’t have the capabilities of some of the others I just gave them things to do that they could do. They learned to read if they could, otherwise we worked on other areas of learning. What we call fine motor skills, to do things with pencils, anything that they might come across in life. That’s what they needed to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have much interaction with the parents?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did that work into their schooling?
MRS. DRESNER: Well into the schooling, not so much because a lot of these parents lived far away into the counties. Mostly, they would invite me. I would go to their homes for some occasion. It’s the first time I walked into a house where they had a potbelly stove in the living room. It was kind of nice, but you just have to be careful not to get burned. But no, I loved it. I loved learning about the people and mingling with the people. All kids were equal. To me it was what you were able to do and more importantly what you were able to learn to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now when you came to Tennessee to teach what type of credentials did you have to have?
MRS. DRESNER: Well in those days, I don’t think you even needed a teaching degree. But I did, I had a degree in Special Education and regular education. I was officially certified as a teacher, but that’s another interesting story. The state insisted I have a Tennessee license. Well, I had a New York license, but I had to get a Tennessee license. It wasn’t necessary just reciprocal. They wrote to my supervisor who was Sarah Ketron. I’m sure you’ve heard of Sarah Ketron?
MR. HUNNICUTT: I think so.
MRS. DRESNER: If she was still here she would definitely have to be interviewed. She went to bat for me with the State Department and UT wrote back and said that I would need lots of courses. I looked at Sarah and Sarah looked at me and we said, “That’s ridiculous.” Here I am with a bachelor’s degree in Special Education and so we wrote to the state again and she finally worked with them. They decided okay I had to take this class in education of brain injured. She was going to go again because I had already taken that class, but I said don’t sweat it. I’ll take one class and we’ll be through with this nonsense. Not only did I take the one class, but they used the exact same textbook that I used in New York in the class. It was no problem and I did it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me more about your teaching career.
MRS. DRESNER: Well, I started out at Daniel Arthur then I took a ten year hiatus where I just stayed home, had four children. I did not return to work until my youngest child was nursery school age. The parents approached me and they asked me, “Would I start a preschool for handicapped kids.” I said, “Yes I would,” because I said if I could do it during the time that my youngest daughter was in nursery school that would be no problem. I never had to fool with babysitters or child care. My oldest three, I had four children and they were all born within six years. So I said okay I would do it. They rented a room for me. It was at the Y, I believe. I got a room to teach in. The preschool I taught was from 9:30 in the morning to 11:30 because my daughter went to the Oak Ridge Nursery School from 9:00 to 12:00. As had some of my other children, they were all in elementary school at that time. I taught at this preschool for handicapped children, that’s what they called them at the time. Today they would be developmentally delayed. That worked out very well. It was good for me. We did Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Just those three, two hours every time we met.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What are your children’s names and ages?
MRS. DRESNER: You want their ages. Okay, this is going to tax me now. The oldest child’s name is Steven Dresner and he was born in ’55, so he’s 57. His next sister is Faye Dresner and she is 56 years old. Then there’s a son, David Dresner who is 54. Then my youngest daughter Eva Dresner is 51 ½.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s talk a little bit about your children going through the Oak Ridge school system. Your oldest son went to which elementary school?
MRS. DRESNER: Linden, Linden Elementary. Then he went to Robertsville and then to the High School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where were you living when he went to Linden?
MRS. DRESNER: Let’s see, in 1961, we moved to where we live right now, Stanton Lane. He started out at Woodland. He had a wonderful education. I can’t remember his kindergarten teacher, but I know she must have been wonderful. Then he had – I can’t remember her name, but I can see her face. He had her for half of first grade before moving to Linden.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At Woodland?
MRS. DRESNER: At Woodland. Something with an F. I think they had a car establishment here, her husband did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Faulkner?
MRS. DRESNER: Thank you. Yes, that’s it. Ms. Faulkner was his teacher and she was great because my son liked to talk all the time, at that time. I said to her, “How is he doing?” She said, “Fine, but he likes to talk.” I said, “Well what do you do when he talks?” She said, “Oh nothing, I’ll put him under my desk during rest time and he just talks to himself, it’s okay.” She was a neat lady. She was the kind of person that could accommodate herself to whatever idiosyncrasies the kids had. It’s good because that’s what you need in a teacher.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You’re second child, which school did she go to?
MRS. DRESNER: Faye went to Linden, Robertsville and the high school. David, also Linden, Robertsville and the high school. Eva went to the same place.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Compared to your type of dress that you wore to school versus your children was there any difference?
MRS. DRESNER: Well I didn’t wear jeans to school in those days. They either wore jeans or something I had sewn for them. One of these block stitch things, we had pants and a shirt. I never did skirts. Quick things. And in the summer mostly they’d wear a lot of shorts and tank tops.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you perceive the type of schooling that your children got when they were going through the Oak Ridge school system?
MRS. DRESNER: Wonderful, we had a wonderful school system at that time. I’m not in it now. My children got a wonderful education. Each of them in his own time said he/she was well prepared for anything that came along. Many times kids will come out of high school, go into college and think “gee, I’m really not prepared for this.” They all were. Every one of them. They went to schools around the country. My husband and I encouraged them to go wherever they wanted. That was our gift to them and they did. The youngest went to Boston University and became a nurse. The next oldest one went to Washington University and became a physician. The next one went to Washington University also, and became an M.S.W.. The oldest one went to Northwestern and became a physician.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Are any of your children living in Oak Ridge now?
MRS. DRESNER: No, but I’m having a whole bunch come this weekend.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about when you were raising your children the daily life of a mother that has children in those age ranges.
MRS. DRESNER: My life was busy because after the youngest one came through into school I worked full time then. I got a job with the school system in special ed. The kids, they walked to school in the morning. Whether it was the old Linden or the new Linden, the house we lived in was kind of right in the middle of those two places. Most of the time my kids walked to school. Nasty weather they could ride the bus if they wanted to. Some periods of time buses were free and then they went back to being paid for. That’s what they did. What else did you ask for?
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get around the city when you had to go out?
MRS. DRESNER: A car. The first year we were here we shared a car. My husband and I shared a car. Once I started working that was not going to be easy to do so we got another car. The first car we had was from the profits I had earned at Daniel Arthur. We had a green 1955 Chevrolet with those fins on the back. I’ll never forget it. We drove that for a long time, until we went overseas and we lent it to his dad and the New York, New Jersey Turnpike got ahold of that car and finished it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you do your shopping when you went grocery shopping in the early days?
MRS. DRESNER: A&P.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was that located at that time?
MRS. DRESNER: Gosh, it went a few places in town. The last time I remember it was – you know where Taco Bell is? On the Turnpike? I think that’s the area.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The building next to it?
MRS. DRESNER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That was its last place.
MRS. DRESNER: Right, that was its last place. I remember that one. It was in a place or two before that I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there any particular reason you liked the A&P?
MRS. DRESNER: It was big. It had everything you needed in it. With three kids hanging around me I wasn’t into going shopping. Carpools were not a big issue because kids were not programmed then as they are now. They just didn’t. They went out and played.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did your family do for recreation or entertainment?
MRS. DRESNER: They entertained each other. I’d say, “Go outside and play,” and that’s what they did. No, we went to the drive-in movies.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that the first time you’d ever been to a drive-in movie?
MRS. DRESNER: No, they had drive-ins up north, but I didn’t make a habit of it. We had a local theater. We’d go there occasionally. Mostly, we went out and played too. It was the thing to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you involved in any clubs or other social events in the city?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes I was. I had to write some down because they don’t come easily anymore. I was active in some woman’s organizations. We went to the synagogue here in Oak Ridge and they had some woman’s organizations. I went to several of those and was moderately active. I mean when you have four kids at home and are working full time and I did go back to school in the late ‘60s to UT. I didn’t have a whole lot of time for organizations. At that time I tried to join the American Association of University Women, which I am a member of today, but in those days because the college I went to was a male college they didn’t have a high enough percentage of women professors for AAUW to recognize them as a place that you could come from. It’s not so anymore. I am a member there. Fundraising was primarily the focus and information getting was the focus of the organizations. I belonged to the Red Cross. I was a swimming instructor. For many years, I taught there and then I took over for the summer as the director of all the swimming classes that we did. I would train the teenagers to teach and we could have as many as 2,000 kids come through in a summer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that at the outdoor swimming pool?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, at the outdoor swimming pool, which was only spring fed water, at the time. You talk about cold, it was cold. My kids were raised there in the summer. That’s where they grew up. I used to help arrange lessons for the kids from Daniel Arthur to come swim. They had a separate time; swimming was from 9:00 to 12:00 noon. For the next thirty minutes the kids could come in and swim and do their thing, have fun. I had a couple of people who helped me because there was paperwork no matter where you’d go. Red Cross paid me $50 a month to teach the kids and have classes. There were day classes, as well as lessons in the evening. I had a friend that helped me with the paperwork and the books so I said, “I’m going to split my salary with you.” It was $25 for each of us per month and that was probably enough to do the gas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Oak Ridge Hospital during the time you’ve been here? Has that been an adequate facility? How would you rate that hospital?
MRS. DRESNER: As far as I was concerned. I had three of my children there and it was more than adequate. I’m sure there are many people in town, older people like myself that remember Dr. Pugh. No one liked him because he didn’t have much of a bedside manner. I loved him. He was just great. We remained friends until he passed away.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have any acquaintance with Dr. Preston?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh yes, I did. He and Dr. Hardy. Thomas and Hardy were there also. Dr. Thomas though, he was the love of my life and he just passed away. That pediatric group was great.
MR. HUNNICUTT: If you were a child in Oak Ridge you knew Dr. Thomas or Dr. Preston or Dr. Hardy. One of the three. How about Oak Ridge dental facilities? How was that in the early days when you came?
MRS. DRESNER: Do you remember Dr. Mills? Dr. Shirley Mills. Well he must have thought he was still working on a marine or something. I liked him too. He was rough and gruff, but he was an excellent dentist.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I have a little experience with that myself. They’re not as gentle as they are today.
MRS. DRESNER: No, no. But he was a good man. He put in good fillings. His work was excellent.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me some more about your teaching career.
MRS. DRESNER: Okay. When I came to Oak Ridge – I started officially with Oak Ridge in 1967. That was three years after I started the preschool group. Then Oak Ridge schools approached me and Sarah Ketron asked, “How would you like to start a class for handicapped kids in Oak Ridge?” I thought wow it’s just falling my way because I was ready for that next step. My youngest child was going into regular school so I was going to have all this time on my hands. Interestingly, in September when she was in school I thought after about a week, “What am I going to do with myself?” It was in October that Sarah asked me about starting a new Special Education class. I said, “It’s just fate. I’ve got to do it.” November was when we started the class. I remember Sarah giving me $100 to go buy some stuff that I would need, equipment for the class. The reason they wanted this class to start at that point was because they had a little girl, she may have been six or seven at the time who was terrorizing the schools. Absolutely terrorizing the schools. She was thrown out of I think four elementary schools and I think we had seven at the time. They had to do something with her. Sarah was ahead of her time with the Disabilities Act. She decided they were going to start this class. Not all the kids were like this little girl, thank goodness. They were just kids that had problems that couldn’t be handled easily in the schools. I had about ten and except for the little girl all the rest were boys. Those are the only kinds of kids I really worked with the whole time I’ve been here. We had everything from this little girl who would just have fits sometimes and I would put her with my teaching assistant, who was wonderful, who followed me, who came with me. I said I’ll do this if this teaching assistant comes with me and her name is Evelyn Beatty. She passed away a couple years ago. We worked together for over 20 years and it was the best harmony you could ever think of. We just knew what the other was going to do. Anyway, we had this class and one of our kids was diabetic and he needed certain procedures done in school so we made it into a teaching lesson. I put up this big chart up on the wall and we would tell this young man, “Go urinate in the bottle.” He’d come out and the kids could take turns. They used dip sticks at the time and they would put a dip stick in it and we would hold it up to match it with the paper that was on the wall. They decided what color it was and whether he was okay or not. It got to where the kids would go, “Okay so and so go pee in the bottle.” He did and it was a lesson. We learned about what we were doing and why we were doing it and why him. That’s probably pretty much how I did my teaching.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the first class?
MRS. DRESNER: Elm Grove. You remember Elm Grove School?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was it in Elm Grove the whole time?
MRS. DRESNER: No, in special education generally if the distribution of students to classrooms changes from year to year the person that gets changed the most is the Special Ed. person. You’d either be moved into another classroom in the building or another school. I told the school after about three or four years of being moved around I said, “You realize I’m the most expensive paid moving man in this whole school system?” But that’s what you had to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the parents take the children to school or was there transportation for them?
MRS. DRESNER: I don’t remember buses back then. There may have been, but that was not an issue I dealt with I guess. They may have.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s an interesting story about the little boy that was diabetic. Do you recall any other interesting stories like that?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, lots of stories. I could sit down and think of dozens of them. Let me tell you something, some of the things I did with the kids I couldn’t do today. I probably couldn’t do them today.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why is that?
MRS. DRESNER: I think probably it would be Hippa, the Privacy Act. It would be some parents who’s coming in and saying, “I’m going to sue you for telling my child he had to get out of your room.” Or something like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you discipline your children?
MRS. DRESNER: Okay, one thing I want you to know is that I never ever spanked a child. Ever. We had a contract with Ridgeview Mental Health Center. We were very fortunate. They would send over one of their psychologists who would spend two mornings in my classroom a week. He came in and just observed the first couple of times. This was just in the beginning. Then after we finished, after a couple of weeks he said, “Okay, Blanche, do you want to know all the things you’re doing wrong?” and I said yes. I was having a hard time with discipline. So he said okay and he said, “You are reinforcing all of the wrong things”. In other words, I am reinforcing the bad behavior because if I say to a child, “So and so don’t talk”, I’m really paying attention to him. He said, “What you have to do is look for the good things and reinforce those.” I got to thinking about it and I did reading about it and I thought he could be right. I tried some of this stuff and I did it by just talking to the kids. I found something good. If you were misbehaving in class and another child over here was being really good, rather than pay attention to your misbehavior I would say, “Oh Johnny, gosh you are doing such a good job.” I would praise him. Finally, this guy here got the idea if he wants my attention he is going to have to behave. So that’s how it all started. Then when I got moved after a number of years we started a Diagnostic Center in 1974. That was a place where I got children from all over the system, but in the beginning it was mostly elementary kids, because they had a problem that couldn’t be handled in a regular school. There’s no time for it. Then I would work with them and they would go back to their regular schools. It got to where I did that in the mornings and then in the afternoons I could go out into the schools and work with the kids and their teachers. It was a wonderful idea. Believe me; every school needs a class like that. I was one for all the elementary schools. It was just elementary school at the time. I had kids, I had to look for the good things to reinforce. There was one little girl that I had that I wanted to find something good to say and I was having trouble. One day when she was working and I looked at her and said, “Oh, so and so you are breathing so well. Your breaths are just going in and out.” I made a big to do over the way she breathed. She thought that was terrific. I was paying attention to her.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you discipline your own children related to the handicapped children you were schooling?
MRS. DRESNER: Well let me tell you something, it’s a whole different picture in your own home than it is in your classroom. I can be more objective first of all. Although, I love these kids I don’t have the emotional attachment to the kids that are not mine as compared to kids that are mine. By the time I got home at the end of the day I was tired. They’re good kids and they helped cook and they helped clean up. They tease me to this very day about my Sahara chicken, but when I went to school they were expected to come home and help fix dinner for their dad. Those were the days when we didn’t worry too much about leaving a chicken out in a cooking bag in the oven. None of them got diseased or died or anything, thank goodness. Oh they were good kids. Four of them in a small house is really packing them kind of tight. There were times when I didn’t want anything to do with them. I can see myself taking a book, going into my bedroom and saying, “Don’t call me unless there is blood.” They knew me. When it was clean up time, I didn’t care about them being in the right place. My husband had built a huge toy box. I said, “Just as long as I don’t see them on the floor, I don’t care. You have them to play with. That’s fine.” They would stack them into this toy box and we still have the toy box. My husband uses it for extra wood scraps. They had chores to do. They had responsibilities around the house. In fact, when they were quite young, they were still in elementary school, I bought each one of them a laundry basket. I found that was all I did was work, go to school, and do laundry and cleaning on the weekend. That was more than I could handle. Each one of them got a laundry basket and I’d say, “Okay guys, this is yours. Each one of you is responsible for your own laundry and you can go in clean clothes or go in dirty clothes. I don’t care.” That’s the important thing. The parent has to detach herself or himself from the situation. I’ve talked to my own kids now and I can hear them saying, “Oh well, he goes to school and he has this and he has that, so I help him out.” At that point, I took away the emotional attachment from seeing that my kids went in dirty clothes. If they wanted to go in dirty clothes, which they never did, that was going to be a good learning experience for them. It was the same thing for their bed linens. I used to change four beds and ours every week. Those were the days when you did it every week. I said to them, “If you want to sleep on dirty sheets go ahead. If you want to sleep on clean ones, wash them.” Well I had one son who could hold out longer than any of the others and sleep on his sheets; I don’t know how many weeks. I don’t even want to know. Today, I want you to know my kids are probably the neatest and cleanest kids. I don’t mean they have no messes in their houses. They have dogs and cats and stuff. But I must have done something to impress them with the idea that they had to care about their bodily comforts and how they look, whether their clothes are clean or not.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Normal schoolteacher has an idea of what she’s going to teach. What gave you the curriculum to teach your children?
MRS. DRESNER: That’s a good question too. Each of the kids that I had were on different levels, regardless of the age. Some were grade level appropriate, but many were not. So what I would do was I worked with them individually. I also started doing a lot of achievement testing. Some ability testing. We had a school psychologist at the time, Al Nipper. He was there for many years. Very, very, very bright man. I learned a lot from him. I worked with the kids and I was very analytical with them. If you had a problem in math, I probably wanted to know what was causing it. What were some of the things that were getting in the way of learning? I had book rooms when we had some extra spare room in school buildings. Books were not safe. If I walked by you might find one missing when I went by because I accumulated books from every grade level that I could find. Also, I learned the curriculum from every grade level. There are books which tell you what is you’re supposed to teach. With a lot of the children I found they were being asked to do things that they were really not ready for, nor capable of.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you determine where one child should be in one grade and so forth…how is that determined?
MRS. DRESNER: Well right now it’s determined by age. What age you are is what grade you go into. I had to follow along with that. I couldn’t just change the grade. There were times when I could recommend to a principal that this kid is not ready to be promoted or this child needs A B C. I could do that because eventually I became a school psychologist. I was always going to school. I got my masters down here. I finally went and got a doctorate because it was there. It kept me alive. Hanging out with younger people was a pretty good thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: From a student psychological point of view if you had that particular student back could you see an impact on the student’s behavior?
MRS. DRESNER: You mean once I had them for a while.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. DRESNER: Some, yeah. I learned one thing: if you helped one child in a semester, you did a lot. I’ve been to weddings of students I had. Just yesterday we were talking to a young man in Kroger’s who has been with Kroger’s for 30 years. He’s manager of a certain department. I had him when he was in first grade. You have to give the kids a sense of being worthwhile. Humor is a big part of what you do too. I remember I had a child there I was working with. He was having trouble with math. I happened to turn around one day and I saw him with his shoes and socks off of one foot and he was sitting in his chair. He was holding up his hand and he had his bare foot up in a chair. He’s using his toes to count with. He knew he had to relate numbers to something. That was his way of making it more concrete.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Talk about when you went to the other schools to help these children. Were they in classes with the other children?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, they were in the regular classes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you perceive the other children acted towards these special children?
MRS. DRESNER: They didn’t react poorly unless the kid was a real behavior problem. Then they might have a problem associating with them but otherwise - In fact, to give you a sense of comfort that the kids felt… there was one child who was in second grade at Linden Elementary. He was coming to me in the mornings. In the afternoon, it gave me the opportunity to go out. His teacher said to me one day, “You’re never going to guess what happened. The youngster came in and the kids all said to him they wanted to go with him to where he went in the morning.” I would use a lot of behavioral modification techniques. Children could earn candy. They could buy whatever they wanted for the tokens they earned. He looked at them and he said, “You have to have a problem to go where I’m going.” That kind of made me feel good, told me that what we were doing was okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was the age group from youngest to the oldest that you’ve taught?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, I had preschoolers all the way up to 12th graders. There were times that fortunately not a whole lot of them were algebraists or calculus takers or I would have had to go out and learn that too before I could teach it to them. They were all ages and all were having problems. I could handle most of the curriculum that we had to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there ever a situation with a child that you just never thought you’d get through to that child and then you did? How did that happen?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes. This is when I had the Diagnostic Center in ’74. I just couldn’t teach on child to read. I couldn’t teach him to read. I couldn’t find a technique. We learn things through touch, through hearing, through sight, through speech. I just couldn’t find anything so I thought and went to some of my material and looked through that. I realized we would try a combination of things. They call them modalities. It’s just styles of teaching. My teaching assistant and I sat down and took the first three pre-primers; those were the beginning books the kids were using in the schools. We took every word, because they have a word list that you have to know for that book. We cut out sand paper letters that were about two inches tall and made words on a big piece of tag on the bottom. We stapled the sandpaper letter on that and we would have a couple of lines drawn on it so that the child could not only take his finger and trace it over the letter, but they could write it as well on the top and erase it. He was learning in two ways and he could read it in the book as well. I had one little boy from the beginning of the semester to Christmastime. He started not to need those as much and eventually he went back into school and we did that for the whole year. You know the bumps you get on your fingers from cutting sand paper letters? But he managed by the end of the school year to be well grounded in the beginning words of that series. I’ve never heard from him again after that, but his mom would say he’s doing fine.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you think your children perceived you being a teacher for special education children? Do they today realize what you really did for these children?
MRS. DRESNER: I think so because I used to bring some of the kids home with me on the weekend. A couple of them came home on the weekends and they knew my kids. I remember this one girl, the one that ran from school to school. She’d come home with me and I told my kids they had to set the table because we were going to sit down to eat. I thought I’m going to do this young lady a favor by not asking her to do any of this because she does a lot of it at home. I found her at the top of the stairs to the basement. She was crying. I said, “Why are you crying? What is the matter?” She said, “Because I want to do what they’re doing.” We went out Downtown and my kids got an allowance. I don’t know 50 cents apiece, or something like that. I gave her an allowance just like the kids. She’s a married woman, has five kids, lives in Ohio… But I showed her what a real family was like and not necessarily the family she came from, which was tough.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you hear from your former students very often?
MRS. DRESNER: Some. In fact, not too long ago we had gone to a movie. My husband and I and some of our friends went to the movie. We were at the restroom area there, the movie was over. When I came out my husband was talking to this young man and his wife. They had a couple of kids. Turns out he was an ex-student of mine. He told me his name and how he had changed of course. He was in middle school and this was a long time ago. He was a grown man with kids. I said to him, “I’m sure glad to see you,” I didn’t want to say, “On the straight and narrow.” The thing was he was in my classroom at the Diagnostic Center. That’s when we were housed in a portable behind the Administration Building. The Diagnostic Center was there for a while. At that time I just happened to have a large group of kids from the middle school and high school. They would come in with the ugliest t-shirts with Guns N’ Roses, knives and blood. I just said I wasn’t having any. So I said to them, “You can’t come in with those shirts anymore. You have to turn them inside out. You’re just going to have to do it.” I can’t remember what I was going to take away from them or deprive them of. I guess, some of the fun stuff if they didn’t do what I asked. I said, “No hats in here either”. They said, “We can wear these shirts at the high school.” I said, “Yeah but if you were doing so well at the high school, you wouldn’t be here. Then you could do what you want to do.” For about a week I got tested and they all came in with those shirts and we had a bathroom right inside of the portable. I said, “To the bathroom, sir.” They’d go in and turn their shirts inside out. They knew I was going to stay on them… They weren’t bad kids. They were dysfunctional kids at the time. They were that way because nobody really made them do it the right way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you use music in any of your teaching?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I wish. Well one time we did take - we had an alternative class that was right next door to us. We took those kids to the dinner show place in Knoxville. Do you remember there was a place in Knoxville that served dinner and you saw a show? They had to get dressed up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Westside Dinner Theater.
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, that’s it. We took them there. I used to take kids out to eat. There was one kid I remember, I told him he could even bring a friend with him. We went to the hotel for dinner and I told the people at the hotel that I knew, “Just lay it on really thick for this one. Make sure all the amenities are followed”. He came; he had a jacket on with a handkerchief in his pocket. They said all the right things and they behaved like two perfect gentleman.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Which hotel was this?
MRS. DRESNER: The Doubletree. Not long after it was built. I still see this person’s mother. He’s doing fine.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did your husband handle all this while you were teaching?
MRS. DRESNER: He was working while I was teaching so he handled it fine. He never objected when kids came to the house. They weren’t destructive, they were pleasant. It was fun and we all had a good time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How’s the school system as far as special education children?
MRS. DRESNER: I don’t really know. They have special ed. classes in each of the schools. There’s a lot more paperwork. A lot more keeping track. Many times, too. there are subjects you have to teach. My philosophy is I would teach them reading, writing, and arithmetic. Beyond that if they would go do more, they could leave me and go to a regular classroom. It’s just a different world. It’s like an administrator once said to me “you’re the kind of teacher that does not ask for permission, but asks for forgiveness later.” I said I’d never broken any rule. I never did. One time I had a kid that came into class, the same girl that I’ve had a lot of experience with, came to class and she had on this beautiful dress. One eye was closed like this and I asked what was the matter. She wouldn’t say anything to me. I said to my teaching assistant, “Watch these kids.” Ms. Beatty was totally capable of doing what I was asking her to do. “I’m taking her to the doctor.” I called up Dr. Ray Johnson, who was my ophthalmologist. I said, “Ray, I have a kid here who I need you to see.” First, I went to Dr. Thomas, the pediatrician. I went there first with her. He said, “Bring her in right away,” and I did. He tried to open her eye and he couldn’t. When he got it open it was totally opaque. He said, “She’s got to see an ophthalmologist.” I said, “Okay call Dr. Johnson,” and he did. In the meantime they got Mary Elizabeth Alexander who was a Special Ed. counselor. She went to the house to get the mother and brought her over to the office. She and I sat in the waiting room and we could hear Dr. Johnson chewing mom out. What had happened was the little girl came in after she was supposed to. Her mother told her to go get a switch from the tree. That was another expression I learned down south. She whipped her with it and a piece of the branch lodged in her eye. Dr. Johnson put her in the hospital. She was there for nine or ten days. We tried to bring other agencies into the picture, but were not successful. Dr. Johnson finally said to me, “Blanche, I’m going to have to release her.” It was ten days that she was in there. The eye was perfect. It was fine. Thank goodness it healed properly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you were concerned about the atmosphere that she would return to?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When did you retire from teaching?
MRS. DRESNER: Three and a half years ago, 2010, I believe.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So from when you first started up till the point you retired you could see a lot of change in policies that prohibit you from doing what you do. Tell me a little of those things that changed.
MRS. DRESNER: Well first of all there’s a lot more paperwork. Certain standards, certain achievements that had to be done. That wasn’t ever a problem before, especially with these children. I’m not saying this is true for all kids. For these children the most important thing was to give them a sense of self-worth and to let them know that they can do anything they were capable of doing. They have to understand what they are capable of doing. There are a lot of kids who are not capable of doing things and they are being asked to do it. It’s not just the teacher. The parent has to realize also what a child is really capable of doing. I worked a lot with parents. As I said, I couldn’t save all of them. Not by any stretch of the imagination, but those that I did help and that I did offer a life to … or allowed them to access a life in some way. That’s why I miss the kids still. If you just let me go in and work with the kids, although I don’t know if I have that kind of energy anymore.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well you have to be commended for the service you’ve given to all these kids. That’s a special service that’s different than teaching normal kids, if you say normal kids are normal. You have to be commended for that.
MRS. DRESNER: Well, thank you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: People like you – there’s something about you that’s different from others because you followed that path that most people are afraid to go down.
MRS. DRESNER: That’s what concerns me, not that the path I took was so different. I had one little boy that came to the Diagnostic Center and he heard me chewing out another kid. I just chewed him out for something. At the end of that first day he was with me he came up to me and I said, “Goodbye. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He said, “Oh no, no, no, my mother said I only had to stay one day.” I said, “You only have to stay one day?” He said, “Yes, that’s what she said.” I looked at him and I said, “Did I scare you because I was chewing out so and so?” He looked at me and he shook his head yes and I said, “You have to know I didn’t really mean it. I was just doing it so he would understand what I did, but for you – you’re such a sweet boy.” He came back the next day and stayed for a while. That always amuses me. If I sat down to think about it I could think of lots of stories like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who replaced you at this program?
MRS. DRESNER: Well the Diagnostic Center, they took it away when they had to cut places for money. The Diagnostic Center was dissolved. I became a school psychologist at that time because I had gotten the certification. I worked with preschool and Willow Brook Elementary. Both of those schools I had worked in on and off and had children from. Had a lot of kids from Willow Brook.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now you went from one atmosphere to another atmosphere. Tell me a little about the last segment of your education.
MRS. DRESNER: Well, you have to realize too that even though I went from one building to another building – I was still going with me. At that point in time people knew me. The state did not require all the paperwork that they do today. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to follow the rules, but I didn’t have time to do the paperwork and teach the children. A child took a lot of time. That’s one thing I always gave them. There were times on weekends where I sat up all weekend and I’d write reports. Especially as a school psychologist I had reports to write. That’s not my favorite thing to do, but I did it. Because I tried to get everything in so people would understand everything that this kid was about. My reports were always a little longer than they might have been if it was just a clear reporting of test scores and results.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How have you seen this city progress since you came in the early ‘50s.
MRS. DRESNER: Well first of all, we’ve come into modern times. Although, one thing we had in the ‘50s, when I came was bus transportation and –
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were used to that from when you lived in New York.
MRS. DRESNER: Right and I had to go walk to a certain place to get the bus and now the need for bus transportation in this city is as strong as ever – It needs to be started once again. It’s going to increase because our population is aging. I’m just picking it up at the other end. Now I still drive so it’s okay. We need some kind of transportation, though, for people who are no longer driving.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There used to be a bus service maybe ten or fifteen years ago that didn’t travel completely all through the city, but it was available. What do you think about the economic growth of the city?
MRS. DRESNER: If we got rid of the Mall it might present a different picture. The economic growth has been slow and moderate. It all comes down to funding. Funding is just not how I think it should be. I’d be willing to do my part along with many others. It’s such a large task. Teaching those kids is an easier job than getting money for the city. Now I think this business with – I’m looking forward to good things happening with the Kroger’s and the other stores that are coming in. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a rebirth. If we can get the gentleman that bought the Mall and is just letting it rot…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think that we need a one stop shopping area like we used to have when we had the Mall? That would help the growth of the city?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I’m not saying that necessarily because as far as the growth of the city goes, the more you have – It doesn’t have to be one stop shopping. If you can populate the area with nice facilities. Like Turkey Creek for instance. That’s not one stop shopping. That’s many stops shopping. I know we can’t probably accommodate something like that here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever think that you might move away from Oak Ridge and go back to New York?
MRS. DRESNER: No. I wouldn’t mind going for a visit. It’s a wonderful place to visit, wonderful.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything that we hadn’t talked about that you’d like to talk about?
MRS. DRESNER: God, no. You don’t want me to get into – Just that I have four children. I have 12 grandchildren and I have two great grandchildren. About 11 or 12 of them are coming this weekend and I’m already having nervous sweats.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, I thank you very much for your time. Your oral history will be part of Oak Ridge history.
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, wow.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Hopefully, down the road some person, student or adult will read your history and understand what it was like to teach handicapped children.
MRS. DRESNER: If even one person gets some ideas from that and works with these kids I would be happy.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Thank you very much.
MRS. DRESNER: Thank you, sir.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mrs. Dresner’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF BLANCHE DRESNER
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
December 20, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is December 20, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the studio of BBB Communications, LLC. 170 Randolph Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take an oral history from Mrs. Blanche Dresner about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her address is 111 Stanton Lane, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Please state your full name, place of birth and date please.
MRS. DRESNER: My name is Blanche Dresner. My place of birth is Brooklyn, New York, and my birthday is 12/22/33.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name and his place of birth and date?
MRS. DRESNER: My father’s name was Ben Hershman and he was born in Russia. And you want his date of birth?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes ma’am.
MRS. DRESNER: November the 11th, 1908.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you state your maiden name when I asked you?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I did not.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your maiden name?
MRS. DRESNER: Hershman.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s maiden name and place of birth and date?
MRS. DRESNER: My mother’s maiden name was Eva Balaban. Her place of birth was also in Russia and her date of birth was questionable. We had two dates for her. We thought her birthday was January the 22nd, of ’08, but it turns out my father told me he had a secret after my mother passed away to tell me. And I said, “What was it?” He said, “You know your mother was really ten years older than I?” I said, “Oh good, women are supposed to be older than men.” So I don’t know if her birthday was 1908 or 1898. Your guess is as good as mine.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. DRESNER: I have one sister.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what’s her name?
MRS. DRESNER: Her name is Lilly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And is she living today?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where does she live?
MRS. DRESNER: She lives in San Diego, California.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how your father got from Russia to the U.S.?
MRS. DRESNER: On a boat. I have been able to learn from the internet the manifest of the ship. It gave the names of his two sisters and his dad and mom. They came here – I don’t know when they landed. I know they came through Ellis Island. He came when he was a young boy, eight, ten, twelve, something in the junior high area. He went to Pittsburgh and settled in Pittsburgh. They came of course to be free.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother and father were married at that time?
MRS. DRESNER: No, my mother was not married at that time. She came shortly thereafter. I searched the records at Ellis Island and I can’t find her so she must have come in through a different port. I just have not spent the time doing that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you know how they met?
MRS. DRESNER: I think the families knew each other in Europe. When they came here, they had to be sponsored by someone. Family always got together. Family was a very important thing to the people. My parents met again here in the States after they both arrived in the U.S.A... Everyone was related in some way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did they end up in New York?
MRS. DRESNER: When my father and mother did marry they ended up in New York because that’s where he got a job. I can remember he had a grocery store – a sort of everything grocery store there. I remember the tubs of butter. After a while, the big supermarkets, I think it was A&P at the time, came into the area. That closed them up. They couldn’t handle the competition.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was your sister born in New York as well?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, she was born also in Brooklyn.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little bit about your life in Brooklyn growing up.
MRS. DRESNER: It’s going to be hard to remember, but I can remember myself as a little girl. I was about five – I mean he still had the grocery store through the first five years of my life. It was a good life. I remember he had a car and we’d go places and do things. I can remember eating in the rear of the store. My mother would fix me lunch at the grocery store in the back and I didn’t always like what she served and so if a customer came in and she had to leave I would run away from the store until she could find me and then we’d eat again. It was a good life. Then we moved to a place called Mount Vernon, which is also Manhattan, and I went to elementary school there. I can remember I was in kindergarten and first grade. Then we moved to Queens. My father had no real education. He probably went through the 8th grade in school, but he could build or construct anything. Pencil and paper tasks were not his mainstay. He could configure things in his head, measure and do stuff that used to amaze me considering that he had no formal education. He worked for the Navy shipyards during the war and my sister was born in ’39. Dad was just a day worker. I can remember him getting up early in the morning and going to the Brooklyn Navy shipyards. They would call you. They would have day workers come in and they would call you for jobs. That’s what he did for a long time. My mother was a stay at home mom. My dad’s dad, my grandfather, had a grocery store in the area and we lived under the elevated trains. I can remember the trains.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the trains.
MRS. DRESNER: Well after a while you don’t really hear the noise. You get these trains just running by. It was the subway, but it was over ground at the time. They still have some over ground. It was just a neighborhood that I could go and do what I wanted. I was a pretty independent kid and my parents were busy working.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was the neighborhood crowded? Were there a lot of people that lived in that particular area?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, yes, it was. They were not the tenements that were built later on in certain areas of Manhattan, but they were apartment buildings … a lot of them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little more about your schooling. What type of classes did you take when you went to school?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, I was in regular elementary school and when I lived in Mount Vernon and then when I was in second grade we moved to Queens. That’s where I grew up, in Queens. When I came to Queens I went to a school that ran from kindergarten through the 8th grade. It was a big school and each floor was different levels. That was where I got my education during the war. I was there through the Second World War. That was more country. Queens was more of a country place, like Oak Ridge but a little more crowded. They had more of one family, two family homes, attached homes … it was more country. We’d take our bikes and make tracks on the streets. We’d go out. We played, played, played.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What types of games did or playing did you do?
MRS. DRESNER: We played touch football, we played Kick the Can, we played softball, we played you name it – we played Tag, Hide ‘n Seek. My girlfriend had a bricked in backyard and in the wintertime we’d fill it with water and when it froze we could go ice skating on it. At that time we lived not too far from The World’s Fair. They had closed down as The World’s Fair, but they had a huge building in there that later became the first UN building. Half of it was ice skating and the other half of it was roller skating. If you went from nine to twelve in the morning you’d go free. It was a city place for skating. If you wanted to go in the afternoon you’d have to spend twenty two cents to get in and go ice skating and roller skating.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you get around the city, other than your bicycle?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, we had trolleys, which later turned into buses, and subway. We had a wonderful subway system.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the cost to ride the trolleys?
MRS. DRESNER: Probably about a nickel I think, maybe five cents. Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After eighth grade what was the next school that you attended?
MRS. DRESNER: I went to high school. I went to a place called Forest Hills High School, which was in Forest Hills, Queens. Actually, the high school I should have gone to was called Newtown, not in Connecticut. This was in New York in Queens. I should have gone there. That was in my district, because you had to go according to what your district was. My mother didn’t think that was a good school. So she fibbed and said I lived with a cousin. I’m confessing after all these years. I went to Forest Hills High School and graduated from Forest Hills High School. I rode a trolley or a bus – two buses to get there every morning and two buses to get back. As far as the elementary school goes, we walked. We didn’t have school buses.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe growing up in those days?
MRS. DRESNER: Absolutely, wherever I went. Even when I got into college when I got into City College of New York, CCNY, which is part of the city system. I think I paid $4.50 or $5 a semester for registration and then I guess some small amount for books. I can’t remember buying books, but I know I had books.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was some of your favorite classes when you were in high school?
MRS. DRESNER: Originally, I was a psychology major. At first, City College was a school just for men. Women were later allowed to go into engineering or education. However, in 1952 the entire school integrated. I always knew I wanted to work with kids from the time I was very, very little. So I did, I went to City College in the education track and started taking classes. By the time I went into my junior year, the law changed and females were accepted into every department. They opened it up to females and I decided well what am I going to do now? I am almost two years down the road and I really didn’t want to stay in elementary education. I found special education, but special education had been just a graduate department. You could only go there as a graduate student, but I was very lucky and they opened that up at the right time so I could go into the special education department. So now I had to think of a way that I could do all my required education courses, because they required that you get the bachelors in Regular Ed., as well as Special Ed. They allowed me in one year to take all of those wonderful education classes so that I could start my special education curriculum once I got through those. It was probably the most boring year of my life to take all those classes and it was fine – we worked through it. It was terrible but…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now you lived at home while you were going to this city college?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, lived at home and traveled on the train to get there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: During your time in high school and college, what about dating in a city like that?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, we went in groups. In those days, when you’re 15 … we didn’t need boyfriends and girlfriends. We all hung out together. We did things together and so we belonged to groups of kids. I don’t remember what they were, but they were just groups of kids of different organizations like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. I can remember in the summer they had, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Police Athletic League? It was a group run through the police department and they had camps in the summer. You had to qualify by being poor enough to get to go there, which I did. For many summers, I would sign up and go to those camps and it was $5 for the two weeks. They were wonderful camps. They were up in the mountains in the Catskills somewhere and I went to camp for two weeks for $5. If you were a really good camper you got to stay two weeks for free. I did that several times too, stay two weeks for free. I love the outdoors. I like swimming. I like all the sports and I wasn’t afraid of anything. The only thing I didn’t like unfortunately was fishing because I was always the one that got stuck putting the worm on the hook. That’s not fishing for me. I couldn’t do that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I assume your parents had an accent. Is that correct?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, they did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Growing up with parents like that how do you develop your own accent or the accent for the area that you live in? Is there an influence from your parent’s accent.
MRS. DRESNER: No, not really because remember almost everyone I knew had parents that had accents. All the kids, I went to school with all colors of children, black, oriental. You just name it they came from all over the world into New York. We all had a New York accent. In fact, people still say I have it now. I suppose I do, but let me tell you it is nothing like you will hear if you go to New York and hear some people talk.
MR. HUNNICUTT: No, you don’t have a true New York accent.
MRS. DRESNER: No, but I’ve been here for a long time so…
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after you got out of college what did you do then?
MRS. DRESNER: I got out of college. I had a bachelor’s degree in education, both regular and special. I did my student teaching in special education and I graduated in January. You could graduate in January or in June. The principal asked me if I could take over a second grade class for the next six months. The teacher was going on maternity leave. I said, “Sure”. It was great because that particular school was very close to Pennsylvania Railroad Station and my husband and I had at that point moved to Princeton where he was a graduate student. He had been traveling back and forth while I was finishing school. So I decided I was going to be the one that traveled back and forth. I told the principal, “There’s a train that comes in to New York, but I will be a little late.” He said, “Don’t worry you can sign in.” We had to punch a time clock back then. Although he said, “You can sign in so you can come and take over for six months.” I did and it was a wonderful experience, especially when you have 35 students in your class, all second graders. Very few of whom speak English because it was really in the heart of where most of the Puerto Rican children immigrated to with their families so they were all Spanish speaking. I remember those days fondly because the only Spanish I knew was what I had learned in school. The kids used to laugh at me because of my Spanish accent. I know my husband came up to see me one day, we were going to go somewhere and he said, “God, I heard somebody like a top sergeant shouting down at the end of the hall.” It’s me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what’s your husband’s name?
MRS. DRESNER: Lawrence, Larry Dresner.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And how did you meet him?
MRS. DRESNER: I met him at school, at City College. I had a girlfriend that had graduated six months before I did and so when she was there she already was entrenched in a group of friends in the cafeteria. She said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to some of my friends.” Well, he was one of the friends.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now when you attended elementary school and high school and even college, what do you remember how you dressed when you went to school? What did girls wear to school in those days?
MRS. DRESNER: That’s a good question. I guess I wore skirts a lot. We couldn’t afford too much. Remember when I was in high school we had these sweaters that had these big pictures all over them, that were very popular at that time. But it was skirts. If I had a pair of jeans I don’t think I would have worn them to school at that time, I really don’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now when you first heard the word about Pearl Harbor where were you?
MRS. DRESNER: I was eight years old barely. I don’t know where I was. I remember where I was the day I heard about when President Roosevelt died.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were your first thoughts on that?
MRS. DRESNER: Well just sadness. I mean to me the only president there ever could be in the whole world of course was Roosevelt. He was there when I was born and as far as I knew he was going to be there until I died. It was the same thing with Joe Lewis. You remember Joe Lewis?
MR. HUNNICUTT: The boxer?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, the boxer. He was always champ, when I was born and there was not supposed to be another boxer. He was the one. But President Roosevelt was quite a shock. I didn’t know that much about him at the time other than hearing my parents and other people talk about him, but it was like losing a member of your family.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you and your husband, when did you come to Oak Ridge? And why did you come to Oak Ridge?
MRS. DRESNER: Okay, we came to Oak Ridge for just a summer while still students in 1953. That was because my husband had met someone at Princeton, where he was doing his graduate work, who in conversation had said to him, “If you’re looking for a summer job, why don’t you come to Oak Ridge?” And we did. We had a wonderful time. We sublet one of the Brick Apartments and we made many friends there and we went home at the end of the summer. We bought a car from a man by the name of Harry Thomas. Till this day I still wonder if he was any relation to the Police Chief.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s the same one.
MRS. DRESNER: Same one? That’s what I thought. Well, thank you. You’ve confirmed that for me. We bought a Ford station wagon with wooden doors. Remember the old station wagons?
MR. HUNNICUTT: We called them Woodies.
MRS. DRESNER: Woodies, is that what you called them? Well, for $200 can you imagine? We had that in Oak Ridge and I remember he lived up on Michigan Avenue or somewhere in that area. We got the car and that was the car that took us back home at the end of the summer. It was some car. In fact, a couple of my friends were visiting me. If I don’t have this mixed up with another time, I had to go back earlier for some reason and so my husband and my two friends packed that car with all of our stuff and came up to Queens, which was where I was living. You couldn’t get another metal hanger in there. That was how it was packed. It was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Cars were big in those days. So you had a lot in there?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, yes we did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now up to this point, the summer of 1953, were you still teaching the second grade?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I was in college. I didn’t graduate from college until January of ’54. See that’s why I had to be back. I had to be back in time to finish school and start work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what did you think about Oak Ridge when you first came?
MRS. DRESNER: Well. That’s an interesting story.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Be truthful.
MRS. DRESNER: Truthful, I will. I said to my husband when we came in here, “You’ve got two years in here and then I’m going and you can come with me or not.” I’m not usually that decisive always with something like that, but I said, “There’s no way.” I remember there was a little wooden bridge that we had to go on if we went from Solway over to Kingston Pike, before Pellissippi. We went through back roads. In fact, I went that way to UT for many years, but by that time they had put in a nice little bridge. I used to hold my breath every time I went over that little bridge. You talk about country – for me – we lived in large places. We lived in apartments and stuff, but they had concrete on the streets. There were trolleys and buses and everything was crowded. I came here and it was really country. If you went to the store to buy stuff you had to improvise lots of times, because you couldn’t get the variety of foods you had in New York.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your thought about the people here?
MRS. DRESNER: I judge people for who they are and not where they live or where they come from. When I came here – I liked everyone. I really did, until you showed me that I shouldn’t like you. When we came here I went around looking for a job because I wanted to get some work. Oak Ridge had at that time only one class for mentally retarded children and my specialty was Special Ed. They already had a teacher and they weren’t going to say to her, “You go because we want her”. I went to the county and John Rice Irwin may have been the man who was superintendent at the time. I saw him. You’ve lived here all your life, haven’t you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. DRESNER: Do you remember a place on the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike called Daniel Arthur Rehabilitation Center?
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s on Emory Valley Road.
MRS. DRESNER: Now it is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well it was at one time, but in the beginning you’re right. That’s where it was.
MRS. DRESNER: It was on the Turnpike. Right across from where the hospital is and there’s a gas station there now I think. Anyway, that’s where I worked. It was really a two room school house and I got one of the classes. There were about 17 very handicap children. From very handicap to fairly good, functioning children. Rose Skirtnansky, she’s gone now, but she was here for many years. She got the older kids. I always had the younger ones. The bus driver, Peepsie Sieber, was my teaching assistant and I taught there for a year. I was introduced to many of the county children. It was a county school, in Oak Ridge. I was invited to their homes. One time my husband and I and some other friends decided we were going to go driving around to see Petros and some of the other areas. We wanted to see the prison. The other people I think were from – they weren’t from Oak Ridge either. They were imports. We went up and there was an accident. We had an accident. Some young boy and his friends came tearing down the mountain. We were going up. They were coming down the mountain and side swiped us. We were lucky because when I looked out the side there was just a precipice there. We thought, “Oh my gosh,” so we got out of the car. When we drove up we did not see a soul, not a soul. As we went up the mountain, after we got hit by this kid, people came from all over. They just came down, walked down to where we were. They were concerned about our welfare. One of the women with us was about in her ninth month. So they were really concerned and talked to us. They were the nicest, most welcoming strangers. After that I never had any worries. I’d go anywhere, anywhere.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This was in the Petros area?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, going up to where the prison is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the address where you first lived?
MRS. DRESNER: 192 North Purdue. That was when we lived here for the summer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about when you came back as a permanent resident?
MRS. DRESNER: As a permanent resident, we also lived in the Brick Apartments for a short time. We graduated from a one bedroom, to a two bedroom, to a three bedroom. As our family grew, the apartments got larger. It was always in the row of Brick Apartments.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you notice different about the Oak Ridge apartments versus apartments in Brooklyn?
MRS. DRESNER: Well, the only apartment in Brooklyn or Queens, or wherever we live. I didn’t really have to do a whole lot there as my mother used to do everything, but the one thing I noticed about the apartments in Oak Ridge at that time was they sure had a lot of cockroaches. In fact, there was a lot of young couples, our friends, and what we would do is we’d come home from a movie and before we went into anyone’s apartment we would take turns. We’d roll up newspapers and we’d walk into the apartments and swat away. Turn the light on, okay one, two, three, go. Turn the lights on and swat the fool out of the cockroaches. That’s what I remembered about them, but they were nice. They were adequate. They were roomy. We even adopted a dog that lived two doors down. He loved us and we loved him and he’d come and spend his days with us. It was nice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever meet Daniel Arthur?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I did not. The gentleman that was directing the place at the time … his name was John. I’ve forgotten his last name, but he himself had cerebral palsy. He managed the school and after he left – at the time when he was still there and we were there we had a school psychologist. He was a traveling school psychologist. I imagine him going around on a horse. He didn’t though, he had a car. You probably have heard of him. His name is…I’ll think of it in a second. My Rolodex doesn’t spin quite as fast anymore. Brody. Steve Brody. Do you remember a Steve Brody?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes, I’ve heard the name.
MRS. DRESNER: So he eventually went from being a school psychologist to being director of Daniel Arthur. He ran it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When did Daniel Arthur move to Emory Valley Road. Do you remember?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I don’t. Sometime in the early ‘60s, late ‘50s.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I think you’re right. Did you work at that particular school then?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I never got into that building. What I did do for about two and a half years, is run a preschool for the parents of the handicapped children. This was after that one year at Daniel Arthur. I quit work in order to start my family. I became pregnant and Anderson County allowed me to go ahead and teach even though I was pregnant, because I said to them, “These kids are probably used to pregnant things walking around on the farm. I’m no different. I just walk around the farm.” And they did. They agreed. They let me stay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little about how you approach teaching children like that, of that caliber?
MRS. DRESNER: Just the way I would approach anyone else, any other kid. Show them that I love them, that I was not their friend, that I was their teacher. We had a great relationship. That’s where I learned that a poke - you know what a poke is?
MR. HUNNICUTT: A bag.
MRS. DRESNER: Yeah, but I didn’t know what a poke was. One kid came up to me one day and he said, “Mrs. Dresner, do you have a poke?” He told me it was a paper bag, so you know they educated me as well. They were kids, they were all kids. Those that didn’t have the capabilities of some of the others I just gave them things to do that they could do. They learned to read if they could, otherwise we worked on other areas of learning. What we call fine motor skills, to do things with pencils, anything that they might come across in life. That’s what they needed to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have much interaction with the parents?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did that work into their schooling?
MRS. DRESNER: Well into the schooling, not so much because a lot of these parents lived far away into the counties. Mostly, they would invite me. I would go to their homes for some occasion. It’s the first time I walked into a house where they had a potbelly stove in the living room. It was kind of nice, but you just have to be careful not to get burned. But no, I loved it. I loved learning about the people and mingling with the people. All kids were equal. To me it was what you were able to do and more importantly what you were able to learn to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now when you came to Tennessee to teach what type of credentials did you have to have?
MRS. DRESNER: Well in those days, I don’t think you even needed a teaching degree. But I did, I had a degree in Special Education and regular education. I was officially certified as a teacher, but that’s another interesting story. The state insisted I have a Tennessee license. Well, I had a New York license, but I had to get a Tennessee license. It wasn’t necessary just reciprocal. They wrote to my supervisor who was Sarah Ketron. I’m sure you’ve heard of Sarah Ketron?
MR. HUNNICUTT: I think so.
MRS. DRESNER: If she was still here she would definitely have to be interviewed. She went to bat for me with the State Department and UT wrote back and said that I would need lots of courses. I looked at Sarah and Sarah looked at me and we said, “That’s ridiculous.” Here I am with a bachelor’s degree in Special Education and so we wrote to the state again and she finally worked with them. They decided okay I had to take this class in education of brain injured. She was going to go again because I had already taken that class, but I said don’t sweat it. I’ll take one class and we’ll be through with this nonsense. Not only did I take the one class, but they used the exact same textbook that I used in New York in the class. It was no problem and I did it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me more about your teaching career.
MRS. DRESNER: Well, I started out at Daniel Arthur then I took a ten year hiatus where I just stayed home, had four children. I did not return to work until my youngest child was nursery school age. The parents approached me and they asked me, “Would I start a preschool for handicapped kids.” I said, “Yes I would,” because I said if I could do it during the time that my youngest daughter was in nursery school that would be no problem. I never had to fool with babysitters or child care. My oldest three, I had four children and they were all born within six years. So I said okay I would do it. They rented a room for me. It was at the Y, I believe. I got a room to teach in. The preschool I taught was from 9:30 in the morning to 11:30 because my daughter went to the Oak Ridge Nursery School from 9:00 to 12:00. As had some of my other children, they were all in elementary school at that time. I taught at this preschool for handicapped children, that’s what they called them at the time. Today they would be developmentally delayed. That worked out very well. It was good for me. We did Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Just those three, two hours every time we met.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What are your children’s names and ages?
MRS. DRESNER: You want their ages. Okay, this is going to tax me now. The oldest child’s name is Steven Dresner and he was born in ’55, so he’s 57. His next sister is Faye Dresner and she is 56 years old. Then there’s a son, David Dresner who is 54. Then my youngest daughter Eva Dresner is 51 ½.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s talk a little bit about your children going through the Oak Ridge school system. Your oldest son went to which elementary school?
MRS. DRESNER: Linden, Linden Elementary. Then he went to Robertsville and then to the High School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where were you living when he went to Linden?
MRS. DRESNER: Let’s see, in 1961, we moved to where we live right now, Stanton Lane. He started out at Woodland. He had a wonderful education. I can’t remember his kindergarten teacher, but I know she must have been wonderful. Then he had – I can’t remember her name, but I can see her face. He had her for half of first grade before moving to Linden.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At Woodland?
MRS. DRESNER: At Woodland. Something with an F. I think they had a car establishment here, her husband did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Faulkner?
MRS. DRESNER: Thank you. Yes, that’s it. Ms. Faulkner was his teacher and she was great because my son liked to talk all the time, at that time. I said to her, “How is he doing?” She said, “Fine, but he likes to talk.” I said, “Well what do you do when he talks?” She said, “Oh nothing, I’ll put him under my desk during rest time and he just talks to himself, it’s okay.” She was a neat lady. She was the kind of person that could accommodate herself to whatever idiosyncrasies the kids had. It’s good because that’s what you need in a teacher.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You’re second child, which school did she go to?
MRS. DRESNER: Faye went to Linden, Robertsville and the high school. David, also Linden, Robertsville and the high school. Eva went to the same place.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Compared to your type of dress that you wore to school versus your children was there any difference?
MRS. DRESNER: Well I didn’t wear jeans to school in those days. They either wore jeans or something I had sewn for them. One of these block stitch things, we had pants and a shirt. I never did skirts. Quick things. And in the summer mostly they’d wear a lot of shorts and tank tops.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you perceive the type of schooling that your children got when they were going through the Oak Ridge school system?
MRS. DRESNER: Wonderful, we had a wonderful school system at that time. I’m not in it now. My children got a wonderful education. Each of them in his own time said he/she was well prepared for anything that came along. Many times kids will come out of high school, go into college and think “gee, I’m really not prepared for this.” They all were. Every one of them. They went to schools around the country. My husband and I encouraged them to go wherever they wanted. That was our gift to them and they did. The youngest went to Boston University and became a nurse. The next oldest one went to Washington University and became a physician. The next one went to Washington University also, and became an M.S.W.. The oldest one went to Northwestern and became a physician.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Are any of your children living in Oak Ridge now?
MRS. DRESNER: No, but I’m having a whole bunch come this weekend.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about when you were raising your children the daily life of a mother that has children in those age ranges.
MRS. DRESNER: My life was busy because after the youngest one came through into school I worked full time then. I got a job with the school system in special ed. The kids, they walked to school in the morning. Whether it was the old Linden or the new Linden, the house we lived in was kind of right in the middle of those two places. Most of the time my kids walked to school. Nasty weather they could ride the bus if they wanted to. Some periods of time buses were free and then they went back to being paid for. That’s what they did. What else did you ask for?
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get around the city when you had to go out?
MRS. DRESNER: A car. The first year we were here we shared a car. My husband and I shared a car. Once I started working that was not going to be easy to do so we got another car. The first car we had was from the profits I had earned at Daniel Arthur. We had a green 1955 Chevrolet with those fins on the back. I’ll never forget it. We drove that for a long time, until we went overseas and we lent it to his dad and the New York, New Jersey Turnpike got ahold of that car and finished it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you do your shopping when you went grocery shopping in the early days?
MRS. DRESNER: A&P.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was that located at that time?
MRS. DRESNER: Gosh, it went a few places in town. The last time I remember it was – you know where Taco Bell is? On the Turnpike? I think that’s the area.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The building next to it?
MRS. DRESNER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That was its last place.
MRS. DRESNER: Right, that was its last place. I remember that one. It was in a place or two before that I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there any particular reason you liked the A&P?
MRS. DRESNER: It was big. It had everything you needed in it. With three kids hanging around me I wasn’t into going shopping. Carpools were not a big issue because kids were not programmed then as they are now. They just didn’t. They went out and played.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did your family do for recreation or entertainment?
MRS. DRESNER: They entertained each other. I’d say, “Go outside and play,” and that’s what they did. No, we went to the drive-in movies.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that the first time you’d ever been to a drive-in movie?
MRS. DRESNER: No, they had drive-ins up north, but I didn’t make a habit of it. We had a local theater. We’d go there occasionally. Mostly, we went out and played too. It was the thing to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you involved in any clubs or other social events in the city?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes I was. I had to write some down because they don’t come easily anymore. I was active in some woman’s organizations. We went to the synagogue here in Oak Ridge and they had some woman’s organizations. I went to several of those and was moderately active. I mean when you have four kids at home and are working full time and I did go back to school in the late ‘60s to UT. I didn’t have a whole lot of time for organizations. At that time I tried to join the American Association of University Women, which I am a member of today, but in those days because the college I went to was a male college they didn’t have a high enough percentage of women professors for AAUW to recognize them as a place that you could come from. It’s not so anymore. I am a member there. Fundraising was primarily the focus and information getting was the focus of the organizations. I belonged to the Red Cross. I was a swimming instructor. For many years, I taught there and then I took over for the summer as the director of all the swimming classes that we did. I would train the teenagers to teach and we could have as many as 2,000 kids come through in a summer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that at the outdoor swimming pool?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, at the outdoor swimming pool, which was only spring fed water, at the time. You talk about cold, it was cold. My kids were raised there in the summer. That’s where they grew up. I used to help arrange lessons for the kids from Daniel Arthur to come swim. They had a separate time; swimming was from 9:00 to 12:00 noon. For the next thirty minutes the kids could come in and swim and do their thing, have fun. I had a couple of people who helped me because there was paperwork no matter where you’d go. Red Cross paid me $50 a month to teach the kids and have classes. There were day classes, as well as lessons in the evening. I had a friend that helped me with the paperwork and the books so I said, “I’m going to split my salary with you.” It was $25 for each of us per month and that was probably enough to do the gas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Oak Ridge Hospital during the time you’ve been here? Has that been an adequate facility? How would you rate that hospital?
MRS. DRESNER: As far as I was concerned. I had three of my children there and it was more than adequate. I’m sure there are many people in town, older people like myself that remember Dr. Pugh. No one liked him because he didn’t have much of a bedside manner. I loved him. He was just great. We remained friends until he passed away.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have any acquaintance with Dr. Preston?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh yes, I did. He and Dr. Hardy. Thomas and Hardy were there also. Dr. Thomas though, he was the love of my life and he just passed away. That pediatric group was great.
MR. HUNNICUTT: If you were a child in Oak Ridge you knew Dr. Thomas or Dr. Preston or Dr. Hardy. One of the three. How about Oak Ridge dental facilities? How was that in the early days when you came?
MRS. DRESNER: Do you remember Dr. Mills? Dr. Shirley Mills. Well he must have thought he was still working on a marine or something. I liked him too. He was rough and gruff, but he was an excellent dentist.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I have a little experience with that myself. They’re not as gentle as they are today.
MRS. DRESNER: No, no. But he was a good man. He put in good fillings. His work was excellent.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me some more about your teaching career.
MRS. DRESNER: Okay. When I came to Oak Ridge – I started officially with Oak Ridge in 1967. That was three years after I started the preschool group. Then Oak Ridge schools approached me and Sarah Ketron asked, “How would you like to start a class for handicapped kids in Oak Ridge?” I thought wow it’s just falling my way because I was ready for that next step. My youngest child was going into regular school so I was going to have all this time on my hands. Interestingly, in September when she was in school I thought after about a week, “What am I going to do with myself?” It was in October that Sarah asked me about starting a new Special Education class. I said, “It’s just fate. I’ve got to do it.” November was when we started the class. I remember Sarah giving me $100 to go buy some stuff that I would need, equipment for the class. The reason they wanted this class to start at that point was because they had a little girl, she may have been six or seven at the time who was terrorizing the schools. Absolutely terrorizing the schools. She was thrown out of I think four elementary schools and I think we had seven at the time. They had to do something with her. Sarah was ahead of her time with the Disabilities Act. She decided they were going to start this class. Not all the kids were like this little girl, thank goodness. They were just kids that had problems that couldn’t be handled easily in the schools. I had about ten and except for the little girl all the rest were boys. Those are the only kinds of kids I really worked with the whole time I’ve been here. We had everything from this little girl who would just have fits sometimes and I would put her with my teaching assistant, who was wonderful, who followed me, who came with me. I said I’ll do this if this teaching assistant comes with me and her name is Evelyn Beatty. She passed away a couple years ago. We worked together for over 20 years and it was the best harmony you could ever think of. We just knew what the other was going to do. Anyway, we had this class and one of our kids was diabetic and he needed certain procedures done in school so we made it into a teaching lesson. I put up this big chart up on the wall and we would tell this young man, “Go urinate in the bottle.” He’d come out and the kids could take turns. They used dip sticks at the time and they would put a dip stick in it and we would hold it up to match it with the paper that was on the wall. They decided what color it was and whether he was okay or not. It got to where the kids would go, “Okay so and so go pee in the bottle.” He did and it was a lesson. We learned about what we were doing and why we were doing it and why him. That’s probably pretty much how I did my teaching.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the first class?
MRS. DRESNER: Elm Grove. You remember Elm Grove School?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was it in Elm Grove the whole time?
MRS. DRESNER: No, in special education generally if the distribution of students to classrooms changes from year to year the person that gets changed the most is the Special Ed. person. You’d either be moved into another classroom in the building or another school. I told the school after about three or four years of being moved around I said, “You realize I’m the most expensive paid moving man in this whole school system?” But that’s what you had to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the parents take the children to school or was there transportation for them?
MRS. DRESNER: I don’t remember buses back then. There may have been, but that was not an issue I dealt with I guess. They may have.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s an interesting story about the little boy that was diabetic. Do you recall any other interesting stories like that?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, lots of stories. I could sit down and think of dozens of them. Let me tell you something, some of the things I did with the kids I couldn’t do today. I probably couldn’t do them today.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why is that?
MRS. DRESNER: I think probably it would be Hippa, the Privacy Act. It would be some parents who’s coming in and saying, “I’m going to sue you for telling my child he had to get out of your room.” Or something like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you discipline your children?
MRS. DRESNER: Okay, one thing I want you to know is that I never ever spanked a child. Ever. We had a contract with Ridgeview Mental Health Center. We were very fortunate. They would send over one of their psychologists who would spend two mornings in my classroom a week. He came in and just observed the first couple of times. This was just in the beginning. Then after we finished, after a couple of weeks he said, “Okay, Blanche, do you want to know all the things you’re doing wrong?” and I said yes. I was having a hard time with discipline. So he said okay and he said, “You are reinforcing all of the wrong things”. In other words, I am reinforcing the bad behavior because if I say to a child, “So and so don’t talk”, I’m really paying attention to him. He said, “What you have to do is look for the good things and reinforce those.” I got to thinking about it and I did reading about it and I thought he could be right. I tried some of this stuff and I did it by just talking to the kids. I found something good. If you were misbehaving in class and another child over here was being really good, rather than pay attention to your misbehavior I would say, “Oh Johnny, gosh you are doing such a good job.” I would praise him. Finally, this guy here got the idea if he wants my attention he is going to have to behave. So that’s how it all started. Then when I got moved after a number of years we started a Diagnostic Center in 1974. That was a place where I got children from all over the system, but in the beginning it was mostly elementary kids, because they had a problem that couldn’t be handled in a regular school. There’s no time for it. Then I would work with them and they would go back to their regular schools. It got to where I did that in the mornings and then in the afternoons I could go out into the schools and work with the kids and their teachers. It was a wonderful idea. Believe me; every school needs a class like that. I was one for all the elementary schools. It was just elementary school at the time. I had kids, I had to look for the good things to reinforce. There was one little girl that I had that I wanted to find something good to say and I was having trouble. One day when she was working and I looked at her and said, “Oh, so and so you are breathing so well. Your breaths are just going in and out.” I made a big to do over the way she breathed. She thought that was terrific. I was paying attention to her.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you discipline your own children related to the handicapped children you were schooling?
MRS. DRESNER: Well let me tell you something, it’s a whole different picture in your own home than it is in your classroom. I can be more objective first of all. Although, I love these kids I don’t have the emotional attachment to the kids that are not mine as compared to kids that are mine. By the time I got home at the end of the day I was tired. They’re good kids and they helped cook and they helped clean up. They tease me to this very day about my Sahara chicken, but when I went to school they were expected to come home and help fix dinner for their dad. Those were the days when we didn’t worry too much about leaving a chicken out in a cooking bag in the oven. None of them got diseased or died or anything, thank goodness. Oh they were good kids. Four of them in a small house is really packing them kind of tight. There were times when I didn’t want anything to do with them. I can see myself taking a book, going into my bedroom and saying, “Don’t call me unless there is blood.” They knew me. When it was clean up time, I didn’t care about them being in the right place. My husband had built a huge toy box. I said, “Just as long as I don’t see them on the floor, I don’t care. You have them to play with. That’s fine.” They would stack them into this toy box and we still have the toy box. My husband uses it for extra wood scraps. They had chores to do. They had responsibilities around the house. In fact, when they were quite young, they were still in elementary school, I bought each one of them a laundry basket. I found that was all I did was work, go to school, and do laundry and cleaning on the weekend. That was more than I could handle. Each one of them got a laundry basket and I’d say, “Okay guys, this is yours. Each one of you is responsible for your own laundry and you can go in clean clothes or go in dirty clothes. I don’t care.” That’s the important thing. The parent has to detach herself or himself from the situation. I’ve talked to my own kids now and I can hear them saying, “Oh well, he goes to school and he has this and he has that, so I help him out.” At that point, I took away the emotional attachment from seeing that my kids went in dirty clothes. If they wanted to go in dirty clothes, which they never did, that was going to be a good learning experience for them. It was the same thing for their bed linens. I used to change four beds and ours every week. Those were the days when you did it every week. I said to them, “If you want to sleep on dirty sheets go ahead. If you want to sleep on clean ones, wash them.” Well I had one son who could hold out longer than any of the others and sleep on his sheets; I don’t know how many weeks. I don’t even want to know. Today, I want you to know my kids are probably the neatest and cleanest kids. I don’t mean they have no messes in their houses. They have dogs and cats and stuff. But I must have done something to impress them with the idea that they had to care about their bodily comforts and how they look, whether their clothes are clean or not.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Normal schoolteacher has an idea of what she’s going to teach. What gave you the curriculum to teach your children?
MRS. DRESNER: That’s a good question too. Each of the kids that I had were on different levels, regardless of the age. Some were grade level appropriate, but many were not. So what I would do was I worked with them individually. I also started doing a lot of achievement testing. Some ability testing. We had a school psychologist at the time, Al Nipper. He was there for many years. Very, very, very bright man. I learned a lot from him. I worked with the kids and I was very analytical with them. If you had a problem in math, I probably wanted to know what was causing it. What were some of the things that were getting in the way of learning? I had book rooms when we had some extra spare room in school buildings. Books were not safe. If I walked by you might find one missing when I went by because I accumulated books from every grade level that I could find. Also, I learned the curriculum from every grade level. There are books which tell you what is you’re supposed to teach. With a lot of the children I found they were being asked to do things that they were really not ready for, nor capable of.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you determine where one child should be in one grade and so forth…how is that determined?
MRS. DRESNER: Well right now it’s determined by age. What age you are is what grade you go into. I had to follow along with that. I couldn’t just change the grade. There were times when I could recommend to a principal that this kid is not ready to be promoted or this child needs A B C. I could do that because eventually I became a school psychologist. I was always going to school. I got my masters down here. I finally went and got a doctorate because it was there. It kept me alive. Hanging out with younger people was a pretty good thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: From a student psychological point of view if you had that particular student back could you see an impact on the student’s behavior?
MRS. DRESNER: You mean once I had them for a while.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. DRESNER: Some, yeah. I learned one thing: if you helped one child in a semester, you did a lot. I’ve been to weddings of students I had. Just yesterday we were talking to a young man in Kroger’s who has been with Kroger’s for 30 years. He’s manager of a certain department. I had him when he was in first grade. You have to give the kids a sense of being worthwhile. Humor is a big part of what you do too. I remember I had a child there I was working with. He was having trouble with math. I happened to turn around one day and I saw him with his shoes and socks off of one foot and he was sitting in his chair. He was holding up his hand and he had his bare foot up in a chair. He’s using his toes to count with. He knew he had to relate numbers to something. That was his way of making it more concrete.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Talk about when you went to the other schools to help these children. Were they in classes with the other children?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, they were in the regular classes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you perceive the other children acted towards these special children?
MRS. DRESNER: They didn’t react poorly unless the kid was a real behavior problem. Then they might have a problem associating with them but otherwise - In fact, to give you a sense of comfort that the kids felt… there was one child who was in second grade at Linden Elementary. He was coming to me in the mornings. In the afternoon, it gave me the opportunity to go out. His teacher said to me one day, “You’re never going to guess what happened. The youngster came in and the kids all said to him they wanted to go with him to where he went in the morning.” I would use a lot of behavioral modification techniques. Children could earn candy. They could buy whatever they wanted for the tokens they earned. He looked at them and he said, “You have to have a problem to go where I’m going.” That kind of made me feel good, told me that what we were doing was okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was the age group from youngest to the oldest that you’ve taught?
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, I had preschoolers all the way up to 12th graders. There were times that fortunately not a whole lot of them were algebraists or calculus takers or I would have had to go out and learn that too before I could teach it to them. They were all ages and all were having problems. I could handle most of the curriculum that we had to do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there ever a situation with a child that you just never thought you’d get through to that child and then you did? How did that happen?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes. This is when I had the Diagnostic Center in ’74. I just couldn’t teach on child to read. I couldn’t teach him to read. I couldn’t find a technique. We learn things through touch, through hearing, through sight, through speech. I just couldn’t find anything so I thought and went to some of my material and looked through that. I realized we would try a combination of things. They call them modalities. It’s just styles of teaching. My teaching assistant and I sat down and took the first three pre-primers; those were the beginning books the kids were using in the schools. We took every word, because they have a word list that you have to know for that book. We cut out sand paper letters that were about two inches tall and made words on a big piece of tag on the bottom. We stapled the sandpaper letter on that and we would have a couple of lines drawn on it so that the child could not only take his finger and trace it over the letter, but they could write it as well on the top and erase it. He was learning in two ways and he could read it in the book as well. I had one little boy from the beginning of the semester to Christmastime. He started not to need those as much and eventually he went back into school and we did that for the whole year. You know the bumps you get on your fingers from cutting sand paper letters? But he managed by the end of the school year to be well grounded in the beginning words of that series. I’ve never heard from him again after that, but his mom would say he’s doing fine.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you think your children perceived you being a teacher for special education children? Do they today realize what you really did for these children?
MRS. DRESNER: I think so because I used to bring some of the kids home with me on the weekend. A couple of them came home on the weekends and they knew my kids. I remember this one girl, the one that ran from school to school. She’d come home with me and I told my kids they had to set the table because we were going to sit down to eat. I thought I’m going to do this young lady a favor by not asking her to do any of this because she does a lot of it at home. I found her at the top of the stairs to the basement. She was crying. I said, “Why are you crying? What is the matter?” She said, “Because I want to do what they’re doing.” We went out Downtown and my kids got an allowance. I don’t know 50 cents apiece, or something like that. I gave her an allowance just like the kids. She’s a married woman, has five kids, lives in Ohio… But I showed her what a real family was like and not necessarily the family she came from, which was tough.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you hear from your former students very often?
MRS. DRESNER: Some. In fact, not too long ago we had gone to a movie. My husband and I and some of our friends went to the movie. We were at the restroom area there, the movie was over. When I came out my husband was talking to this young man and his wife. They had a couple of kids. Turns out he was an ex-student of mine. He told me his name and how he had changed of course. He was in middle school and this was a long time ago. He was a grown man with kids. I said to him, “I’m sure glad to see you,” I didn’t want to say, “On the straight and narrow.” The thing was he was in my classroom at the Diagnostic Center. That’s when we were housed in a portable behind the Administration Building. The Diagnostic Center was there for a while. At that time I just happened to have a large group of kids from the middle school and high school. They would come in with the ugliest t-shirts with Guns N’ Roses, knives and blood. I just said I wasn’t having any. So I said to them, “You can’t come in with those shirts anymore. You have to turn them inside out. You’re just going to have to do it.” I can’t remember what I was going to take away from them or deprive them of. I guess, some of the fun stuff if they didn’t do what I asked. I said, “No hats in here either”. They said, “We can wear these shirts at the high school.” I said, “Yeah but if you were doing so well at the high school, you wouldn’t be here. Then you could do what you want to do.” For about a week I got tested and they all came in with those shirts and we had a bathroom right inside of the portable. I said, “To the bathroom, sir.” They’d go in and turn their shirts inside out. They knew I was going to stay on them… They weren’t bad kids. They were dysfunctional kids at the time. They were that way because nobody really made them do it the right way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you use music in any of your teaching?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I wish. Well one time we did take - we had an alternative class that was right next door to us. We took those kids to the dinner show place in Knoxville. Do you remember there was a place in Knoxville that served dinner and you saw a show? They had to get dressed up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Westside Dinner Theater.
MRS. DRESNER: Yes, that’s it. We took them there. I used to take kids out to eat. There was one kid I remember, I told him he could even bring a friend with him. We went to the hotel for dinner and I told the people at the hotel that I knew, “Just lay it on really thick for this one. Make sure all the amenities are followed”. He came; he had a jacket on with a handkerchief in his pocket. They said all the right things and they behaved like two perfect gentleman.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Which hotel was this?
MRS. DRESNER: The Doubletree. Not long after it was built. I still see this person’s mother. He’s doing fine.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did your husband handle all this while you were teaching?
MRS. DRESNER: He was working while I was teaching so he handled it fine. He never objected when kids came to the house. They weren’t destructive, they were pleasant. It was fun and we all had a good time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How’s the school system as far as special education children?
MRS. DRESNER: I don’t really know. They have special ed. classes in each of the schools. There’s a lot more paperwork. A lot more keeping track. Many times, too. there are subjects you have to teach. My philosophy is I would teach them reading, writing, and arithmetic. Beyond that if they would go do more, they could leave me and go to a regular classroom. It’s just a different world. It’s like an administrator once said to me “you’re the kind of teacher that does not ask for permission, but asks for forgiveness later.” I said I’d never broken any rule. I never did. One time I had a kid that came into class, the same girl that I’ve had a lot of experience with, came to class and she had on this beautiful dress. One eye was closed like this and I asked what was the matter. She wouldn’t say anything to me. I said to my teaching assistant, “Watch these kids.” Ms. Beatty was totally capable of doing what I was asking her to do. “I’m taking her to the doctor.” I called up Dr. Ray Johnson, who was my ophthalmologist. I said, “Ray, I have a kid here who I need you to see.” First, I went to Dr. Thomas, the pediatrician. I went there first with her. He said, “Bring her in right away,” and I did. He tried to open her eye and he couldn’t. When he got it open it was totally opaque. He said, “She’s got to see an ophthalmologist.” I said, “Okay call Dr. Johnson,” and he did. In the meantime they got Mary Elizabeth Alexander who was a Special Ed. counselor. She went to the house to get the mother and brought her over to the office. She and I sat in the waiting room and we could hear Dr. Johnson chewing mom out. What had happened was the little girl came in after she was supposed to. Her mother told her to go get a switch from the tree. That was another expression I learned down south. She whipped her with it and a piece of the branch lodged in her eye. Dr. Johnson put her in the hospital. She was there for nine or ten days. We tried to bring other agencies into the picture, but were not successful. Dr. Johnson finally said to me, “Blanche, I’m going to have to release her.” It was ten days that she was in there. The eye was perfect. It was fine. Thank goodness it healed properly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you were concerned about the atmosphere that she would return to?
MRS. DRESNER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When did you retire from teaching?
MRS. DRESNER: Three and a half years ago, 2010, I believe.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So from when you first started up till the point you retired you could see a lot of change in policies that prohibit you from doing what you do. Tell me a little of those things that changed.
MRS. DRESNER: Well first of all there’s a lot more paperwork. Certain standards, certain achievements that had to be done. That wasn’t ever a problem before, especially with these children. I’m not saying this is true for all kids. For these children the most important thing was to give them a sense of self-worth and to let them know that they can do anything they were capable of doing. They have to understand what they are capable of doing. There are a lot of kids who are not capable of doing things and they are being asked to do it. It’s not just the teacher. The parent has to realize also what a child is really capable of doing. I worked a lot with parents. As I said, I couldn’t save all of them. Not by any stretch of the imagination, but those that I did help and that I did offer a life to … or allowed them to access a life in some way. That’s why I miss the kids still. If you just let me go in and work with the kids, although I don’t know if I have that kind of energy anymore.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well you have to be commended for the service you’ve given to all these kids. That’s a special service that’s different than teaching normal kids, if you say normal kids are normal. You have to be commended for that.
MRS. DRESNER: Well, thank you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: People like you – there’s something about you that’s different from others because you followed that path that most people are afraid to go down.
MRS. DRESNER: That’s what concerns me, not that the path I took was so different. I had one little boy that came to the Diagnostic Center and he heard me chewing out another kid. I just chewed him out for something. At the end of that first day he was with me he came up to me and I said, “Goodbye. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He said, “Oh no, no, no, my mother said I only had to stay one day.” I said, “You only have to stay one day?” He said, “Yes, that’s what she said.” I looked at him and I said, “Did I scare you because I was chewing out so and so?” He looked at me and he shook his head yes and I said, “You have to know I didn’t really mean it. I was just doing it so he would understand what I did, but for you – you’re such a sweet boy.” He came back the next day and stayed for a while. That always amuses me. If I sat down to think about it I could think of lots of stories like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who replaced you at this program?
MRS. DRESNER: Well the Diagnostic Center, they took it away when they had to cut places for money. The Diagnostic Center was dissolved. I became a school psychologist at that time because I had gotten the certification. I worked with preschool and Willow Brook Elementary. Both of those schools I had worked in on and off and had children from. Had a lot of kids from Willow Brook.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now you went from one atmosphere to another atmosphere. Tell me a little about the last segment of your education.
MRS. DRESNER: Well, you have to realize too that even though I went from one building to another building – I was still going with me. At that point in time people knew me. The state did not require all the paperwork that they do today. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to follow the rules, but I didn’t have time to do the paperwork and teach the children. A child took a lot of time. That’s one thing I always gave them. There were times on weekends where I sat up all weekend and I’d write reports. Especially as a school psychologist I had reports to write. That’s not my favorite thing to do, but I did it. Because I tried to get everything in so people would understand everything that this kid was about. My reports were always a little longer than they might have been if it was just a clear reporting of test scores and results.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How have you seen this city progress since you came in the early ‘50s.
MRS. DRESNER: Well first of all, we’ve come into modern times. Although, one thing we had in the ‘50s, when I came was bus transportation and –
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were used to that from when you lived in New York.
MRS. DRESNER: Right and I had to go walk to a certain place to get the bus and now the need for bus transportation in this city is as strong as ever – It needs to be started once again. It’s going to increase because our population is aging. I’m just picking it up at the other end. Now I still drive so it’s okay. We need some kind of transportation, though, for people who are no longer driving.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There used to be a bus service maybe ten or fifteen years ago that didn’t travel completely all through the city, but it was available. What do you think about the economic growth of the city?
MRS. DRESNER: If we got rid of the Mall it might present a different picture. The economic growth has been slow and moderate. It all comes down to funding. Funding is just not how I think it should be. I’d be willing to do my part along with many others. It’s such a large task. Teaching those kids is an easier job than getting money for the city. Now I think this business with – I’m looking forward to good things happening with the Kroger’s and the other stores that are coming in. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a rebirth. If we can get the gentleman that bought the Mall and is just letting it rot…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think that we need a one stop shopping area like we used to have when we had the Mall? That would help the growth of the city?
MRS. DRESNER: No, I’m not saying that necessarily because as far as the growth of the city goes, the more you have – It doesn’t have to be one stop shopping. If you can populate the area with nice facilities. Like Turkey Creek for instance. That’s not one stop shopping. That’s many stops shopping. I know we can’t probably accommodate something like that here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever think that you might move away from Oak Ridge and go back to New York?
MRS. DRESNER: No. I wouldn’t mind going for a visit. It’s a wonderful place to visit, wonderful.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything that we hadn’t talked about that you’d like to talk about?
MRS. DRESNER: God, no. You don’t want me to get into – Just that I have four children. I have 12 grandchildren and I have two great grandchildren. About 11 or 12 of them are coming this weekend and I’m already having nervous sweats.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, I thank you very much for your time. Your oral history will be part of Oak Ridge history.
MRS. DRESNER: Oh, wow.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Hopefully, down the road some person, student or adult will read your history and understand what it was like to teach handicapped children.
MRS. DRESNER: If even one person gets some ideas from that and works with these kids I would be happy.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Thank you very much.
MRS. DRESNER: Thank you, sir.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mrs. Dresner’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]